The IAB is out with its latest stats on digital advertising (download a .pdf here).
One thing that stands out from the report is the exploding growth of mobile advertising. It’s now 15% of all online advertising, up from 7% the year before.
While it’s growing, mobile is still pretty small overall. For the first half of this year, mobile ad revenue was $3 billion, up from $1.2 billion the year before.
When you consider all the major ad supported companies that are focused on mobile — Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google, pop to mind — it’s sort of crazy to think about them splitting ~$6 billion in revenue this year.
Bitcoin’s creation myth is great – an unknown computer whiz operating under the handle of “Satoshi Nakamoto” pulled together math, computer science, and financial-market literacy to create the powerful crypto-currency now used to buy everything from illegal drugs to new cars.
We met with a plugged in source at the Money2020 conference in Las Vegas this week who requested not to be identified, and he’s a bit cynical toward the anonymous digital currency.
“Bitcoin has everyone’s attention not because they want a new currency, but because they want a religion,” he said. The parallels: Bitcoin has its invisible figurehead, its outspoken evangelists, and its feisty detractors. It can be harnessed for good just as it can be used for “bad.”
“To look at Bitcoin as merely a currency is to miss the point. Because it solves the famous double-spend problem – you can’t send the same bitcoin to two different recipients just like you can’t spend the same dollar twice – there are incredible opportunities to use it as a means of verifying identity, not just for moving money. The ‘killer Bitcoin app’ has yet to arrive.”
Our source isn’t necessarily referring to a killer smartphone app, but to real-world applications of Bitcoin technology in all kinds of fields. He elaborated on how one could hypothetically use Bitcoin protocols to conduct a presidential election, for example. Non-replicable data could very easily confirm a voter’s identity and prevent any fraud or foul play.
This is an echo of a sentiment we heard earlier in the conference – the state of Bitcoin today is comparable to the Web in its infancy. Functional and useful, but far from perfected.
The PC market continues to fall spectacularly, seeing the sixth consecutive quarter of declining worldwide shipments as well as the lowest back-to-school quarter since 2008. Worldwide PC shipments dropped to 80.3 million units in the third quarter of 2013, according to Gartner, an 8.6 percent decrease from the same period last year.
While Lenovo, HP, and Dell managed to grow their respective shares, this was not enough to offset the losses seen by Acer, Asus, and the rest of the market:
We noted last quarter that Lenovo and HP were neck-and-neck, but that a winner was emerging. Lenovo has managed to increase its lead, although it is still only a 0.5 percentage point gap. Gartner believes the upcoming holiday sales season will be “a key battlefield” for both companies.
Interestingly though, the biggest winner was Dell. The company’s PC shipments exceeded growth rate averages across all regions, according to Gartner.
Acer’s shipments declined a whopping 22.6 percent compared with a year ago, which is likely due to the reduction in netbook shipments. Asus meanwhile saw PC shipments decline 22.5 percent, despite the fact it has shifted its focus from PCs to tablets; the company’s tablet shipments were nearly equal to its mobile PC shipments in the third quarter.
In the US, PC shipments totaled 16.1 million units in the third quarter of 2013, a 3.5 percent increase from the same period last year. This was the second consecutive quarter of shipment growth after six quarters of decline. There was only one company that lost share in the US: Apple.
Gartner believes low inventory from the first half of 2013 as well as the introduction of new models with Intel’s Haswell, including new form factors, brought the sell-in shipment up compared with a year ago. Personally, I’m waiting for Asus to refresh its notebook lineup with Haswell before getting a new machine, so its losses don’t surprise me as I’m sure others are doing the same.
While these results are preliminary, as Gartner is merely offering its estimates, the reason for these poor sales is hardly a mystery. Once again, tablets are to blame.
“Consumers’ shift from PCs to tablets for daily content consumption continued to decrease the installed base of PCs both in mature as well as in emerging markets,” Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner, said in a statement. “A greater availability of inexpensive Android tablets attracted first-time consumers in emerging markets, and as supplementary devices in mature markets.”
Update: IDC also released its Q3 2013 findings today, with similar, albeit slightly better, results. You can find them here.
See also – Canalys: Almost half a billion PCs to ship in 2013, as desktops and laptops dip but tablets grow 59% to 182.5m and Microsoft’s Ballmer says small tablets aren’t PCs
Top Image Credit: Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images
Death, taxes, and Internet ad revenues going up are the new certainties of life, apparently.
Online ad revenues in the U.S. jumped 18 percent from 2012′s numbers to hit a new record, $20.1 billion, just for the first half of 2013. Mobile revenues were the fastest-growing, soaring 145 percent to $3 billion, and digital video ads, crucial to the growth of visual media online such as YouTube, rose 24 percent to $1.3 billion.
That’s good news for Facebook, Google — and the soon-to-IPO Twitter. The top 10 online companies command 70 percent of all online ad revenue.
“Mobile advertising’s breakneck growth is evidence that marketers are recognizing the tremendous power of smaller screens,” Internet Advertising Bureau CEO Randall Rothenberg said in a statement.
Search revenues, the money that search engines such as Google and Bing as well as local search sites such as Yelp and Yellow Pages bring in, continued to rise, but at a slower pace. Search revenues increased 7 percent to $8.7 billion, just about a third more than display ad revenue, which increased 9 percent to $6.1 billion.
Web properties are clearly not seeing the heady 100 percent to 300 percent increases that Internet advertising realized in the late 1990s, but these numbers indicate that online advertising, which has risen in double digits for four consecutive half-year reporting time frames, is alive and healthy.
Online advertising was worth only $82 million in the first half of 1996, crossed the billion-dollar mark first in 1998, and rose over $10 billion just six years ago in 2007.
Interestingly, only one category of ad revenue was down in the last six months. E-mail ads were flat, but almost everything else — classifieds and directories, sponsorships, lead generation, and banner ads — was up. The one category that was down was rich media ads, possibly due to their cost, and the fact that in today’s increasingly automated advertising ecosystem, they’re not as easy to create on the fly and throw into an ad network’s inventory.
But digital video commercials were up, as was mobile.
“Internet advertising’s ability to impact and engage is evident across digital screens, whether big or small,” said David Silverman, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
No social media player worth its salt can keep going without generating revenue via some form of advertising / promotion and it looks like Pinterest is no different.
In a post on the Pinterest blog, CEO and Co-founder, Ben Silbermann, promises that these pins being promoted from certain businesses don’t announce a new ad littered Pinterest experience. Obviously, the folks at Pinterest are expecting a little backlash and are doing what they can to nip it in the bud.
I know some of you may be thinking, “Oh great…here come the banner ads.” But we’re determined to not let that happen. While we haven’t figured out all the details, I can say that promoted pins will be:
—Tasteful. No flashy banners or pop-up ads.
—Transparent. We’ll always let you know if someone paid for what you see, or where you see it.
—Relevant. These pins should be about stuff you’re actually interested in, like a delicious recipe, or a jacket that’s your style.
—Improved based on your feedback. Keep letting us know what you think, and we’ll keep working to make things better.
Do you find this comforting as a user or are you so excited as a marketer that your head might explode?
It looks like Ben is hoping for a little of both with his closing comment in the post:
Thanks so much for all your support these first few years, and we hope you’ll keep pinning with us for many years to come!
Translation: Please don’t have a hissy fit because we need to make some money.
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